Abstract
This article argues that Scotland was presented to two or more generations of New Zealand schoolchildren, from the late nineteenth century down to the 1960s, as a kind of model colony because it had joined willingly with England in union in 1707 and lived peacefully within the British world/empire thereafter. Such a view may have played fast and loose with history, but it held out obvious messages to both Maori children and the children of white settlers. A sanitised version of Scottish history, as promulgated in the New Zealand School Journal to primary schoolchildren, and in Our Nation's Story to secondary schoolchildren, highlighted the advantages of peaceful cooperation within empire. Awkward matters such as sectarian conflict and the Highland Clearances were expunged from the telling. Resistance, independence and subversion were thereby discouraged so long as New Zealand continued to reap benefits from its formal membership of the greatest trading bloc the world had ever seen. There is, though, a twist in this apparently familiar tale of imperial collaboration, appropriation and co-option in terms of developments in both countries in the early twentieth century as more nationalistic identities emerged in an apparently post-colonial world.